Liberals Look Right, and the Right Looks to Sell

Tom Edsall's always been one of the sharper blades in the drawer, and over the weekend he put together a revelatory little piece about what the Right gets right — or, more accurately, What Some Liberals Think The Right Gets Right.

(Edsall was forced into this more interesting approach because all the conservatives he approached did little more than send him links to what he calls "ideological pap," which should tell us all something. Sometimes, I swear the only difference between a Sam's Club and the Heritage Foundation is that you can't buy a good rotisserie chicken at the latter.)

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I am fascinated by some of the responses he got from the liberals he talked to. Andy Stern of the SEIU, for one, tells Edsall that:

"They are more suspicious from a philosophical point of view of big government as an answer to many issues and are suspicious of Wall Street institutionally and not just their high salaries, and bad practices."

Is that last part really true? I've been hearing it a lot over the past few weeks when the other candidates began to belabor Willard Romney over his days as a predatory capitalist, but it's hard to find any substantial evidence that a suspicion of "Wall Street institutionally" is general among conservatives. It certainly doesn't seem to move conservative voters in any demonstrable way, and it damn sure isn't true of the conservative Republican establishment. The more the other candidates attack Willard for the way he makes his living, the stronger the pushback that such attacks are aimed at capitalism its own self, rather than its unproductive predatory form. I'm not seeing Stern's point in action here at all.

Then there's Jonathan Haidt, whose book I am anxious to read, who tells Edsall that conservatives more value...

"...the right to be left alone, and they often resent liberal programs that use government to infringe on their liberties in order to protect the groups that liberals care most about."

I would like a further explanation from Haidt, or from the conservatives to whom he talked, specifically which of their "liberties" were "infringed" upon, and also about what "groups" that liberals care about were the vehicles for said infringements. If this is just about the whole moronic "Your gay marriage endangers my hetero one!" argument, or the even more hair-brained "My First Amendment rights are violated because I can't yell the same slurs my grandpa could!", we're all better off not knowing. But, to me, the most significant takeaway from Edsall's work here is that the liberals gave him serious, thoughtful answers, while the conservatives tried to sell him stuff. That says it all, right there.

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